Empathy

Research on leader empathy per se is beginning to gain momentum. In organizational behavior, this is surprising given that empathy has been characterized as "the sine qua non of all social effectiveness in working life". One domain where women have outperformed men and in which their empathic advantage might be important is transformational leadership. Transformational leaders exert their influence by elevating their followers' needs and objectives, and by affording them with the confidence needed to perform beyond their goals. They exhibit charisma, provide intellectual stimulation, motivate in inspirational ways, and nurse their followers with individualized consideration. Support for the claim that female leaders are more transformational than their male counterparts has been offered in conceptual, empirical, and meta-analytic studies. According to Eagly et al., the primary sex difference in transformational leadership resides in women's greater use of individualized consideration which involves supportive behaviors like encouragement and coaching. Such a consideration that helps develop followers' confidence by attending to their needs would have been more difficult to enact in the absence of empathy.

Transformational leadership is thought to be particularly important in dynamic and unstable environments that rely on the need for change. Given its plausible connection with empathy, one would expect a surge in research interest on gender differences in empathy as it relates to leading chaotic organizations described in the glass cliff. Over the last 25 years, some scholars have been proponents of a "female leadership advantage" and have argued that women are more likely than men to possess the values and abilities needed to manage modern organizations. Accordingly, the changing nature of organizations demands that leaders espouse values such as nurturance, sharing, compassion, consensus building, and inclusiveness all of which are generally associated with female characteristics. Although we have argued that women's empathic superiority relative to men stemmed in part from the differential selection pressures they faced, we are not advocating that women make superior leaders because of a relative advantage in this singular trait. Our goal was to present a framework and empirical findings that explain both why and how women express empathy more than men, on average, and that it is ultimately our perception of these women as being more empathic that contributes to glass cliff appointments. We now move to clarify the relationship between perceived female empathy and glass cliffs.